Repenting our inner heretic: modernist and Pelagian edition

So I was reading a talk given by one of my favorite Scripture scholars, Walter Brueggeman, who specializes in Old Testament prophets and their role in preaching the word of God to the kings and priests and people. In a video talk to the Sojourners “Summit for Change” last month, he spoke about church and state and what terrible bedfellows they are, and he started all the way back with Solomon and the narrative created by the kings of Israel, and how the prophetic tradition peppers the “official” narrative with a counter narrative. The whole thing is wonderful, and can be found by clicking here.

But there was one paragraph that really struck me, one that I think has some validity in our church and in our time, and with all the rancor and arguing in the public square about whether this is a “Christian” country, and who gets to use the name “Christian,” I thought that his insight was worth spreading around a little bit for consideration. Brueggeman says:

If you take the phrase “prophetic imagination,” the imagination part of that is that the prophets are able to imagine the world other than the way that is in front of them. The word prophetic alludes to the reality of God. And what the prophets believe deeply is that God is a lively character, and a real agent who acts in the world, who causes endings and who causes new beginnings. And that's worth thinking about, because that is not ordinary thinking among us — that God is a lively agent and a real character. 

If you consider most conservative evangelicals, they do not believe that God is a lively character and a real agent, because they've got God all packaged up into sustained systematic explanations. And if you consider most theological progressives they don't believe that God is a real character and a lively agent, either, because they really believe that God has no hands but our hands.

When I read that the first time, I thought to myself, “ouch,” because I recognize the truth of what he’s saying. Obviously, his use of "most" is up for interpretation, and maybe you don't consider yourself part of that group, but I definitely think that I do, in some sense. Modern faith is not immune to scientific inquiry. We know, or assume we know, the difference between faith and magic. We know that the sun doesn’t rise and doesn’t set, but that we’re on a ball that spins every twenty-four hours and sometimes it faces the sun and sometimes it doesn’t. We’ve gotten comfortable with science, at least most of us in mainline churches have. We believe that the truth of faith and the facts of science are compatible, that truth, at its core, is one, and that answers that elude us are not God playing a game with us, but that we’re evolving, learning as we go. And faith is not only concerned with things unseen. It’s that we take for granted that not everything that is is part of the quantifiable universe. There are realities that are unverifiable by science. But verifiable and unverifiable realities are aspects of Truth (with a capital T), and there is more to reality and truth than facts and what can be proven.

So when it comes to faith, the temptation might be for us, following Brueggeman's groupings, either to leave God out of the equation because we believe that money, conflict, and power move history forward, generally through institutions of church and state (or both), or we believe that what is possible for good is entirely up to us, doing what we can in a community working to build a more just world. In neither case do we make a big enough place for God, who, in fact, is the prime mover, is the Reality underneath all reality, the “lively agent” in Brueggeman’s phrase, who has a distinctly different purpose in mind for the world than any of us do, a purpose that Jesus calls “the kingdom,” or the “reign of God.”

So all I want to say here is that among the many places we hope to assert divine activity in this world in our liturgy, one that stands out every week is the penitential litany that we call the Kyrie Eleison (or Lord, have mercy.) Of course, the entire liturgy asserts God’s primacy, but as a primacy not of force but one that empties itself into world through Jesus and then through the Holy Spirit. From creation to the end, God is where the loving, creative, exuberant action is, and it keeps manifesting itself in the unfolding cosmos. But we find ourselves in this world in a tough place: things are bad, and don’t seem to be getting better. Right at the beginning of the liturgy, we acknowledge that. We say we’ve made a mess of things, and frankly, we haven’t got a clue about how to fix it, except to keep coming back here on Sunday, doing what we’ve been told to do in memory of Jesus, and then trying to live it out day by day in the streets. At the beginning of Mass, we just say it: Lord, this is your world. You, not the president, not the bank, not the arms salesmen, not the UN, not the church, You are the Lord. We need you to be that for us. That’s what “have mercy” means: you have it, we don’t have it. Please, give it to us.

James Alison tries to get us inside of God's agency, which, if anything, he finds even more radically luminous and active than Brueggeman does, emphasizing that in fact we perceive everything wrongly until we surrender to God's invitation to relax into be loved by the Forgiving Victim, Jesus. He uses the image of a planet that is, unknown to its happy and complacent inhabitants, tipping toward the maw of a black hole. They notice in the distance of space at first a small star, but one which is growing larger and larger in their sky. At first, their ordered existence is thrown into chaos as they fear the approach of this rapidly moving star. But gradually they begin to notice that it is they, their planet, that is moving toward the new star, drawn there by a new gravity, and thus away from the black hole which they had not noticed was pulling them toward destruction. Alison summarizes his metaphor a few paragraphs later:

When we talk about what Jesus came to do, did and is doing in our midst, we are talking about what comes upon us as an alteration of the axis of Creation rather than as a resolution of a moral problem. Our being brought close into the life of God by Jesus living out being a forgiving victim in our midst has this as its effect: that we perceive simultaneously where we used to be heading, into an ever-shrinking world run by revenge, envy and death; and where we are instead finding ourselves drawn: into being forgiven, forgiving, and thus being opened up into true, insider knowledge of creation as it unfolds dynamically....

So, in fact, in our case, being forgiven is prior to being created.

Alison, James. Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults (p. 493-4). DOERS Publishing LLC. Kindle Edition. 

So in addition to being a prayer of praise (“You are mighty God and prince of peace”), the Kyrie is an act of faith and surrender. We keep choosing false gods. We keep choosing pretender-lords. Or worse, we think somehow we have replaced God as the movers of history. Jesus thinks of it as a partnership. God won’t do it without us, we can’t do it without God. When we sing “Lord, have mercy” or “Kyrie eleison,” let’s try to hold that thought in our hearts, and make an act of faith with it, something like, “I’m listening, Lord; I’m trying to live up to the example of Christ in my world. But it's overwhelming sometimes. Everything seems to be moving the wrong way. But you’re the vine, I’m just a branch. Give me, give all of us, what we need to be able to live and bear fruit to bring a harvest of nourishment, justice, and peace to the world.”

Funerals and funeral music: Church, we have a story to tell!

I wrote these thoughts based on an outline for a presentation I gave at the parish on the music of Christian funerals. Feeling it necessary to provide the context for what I wanted to say, I began with a summary of what all liturgy tries to do, and then moved to questions of the funeral liturgy itself and its music. I hope you find this helpful in your own life and ministry.

Before I start talking about music for Catholic funerals, I'd like to speak to the context of what I want to say. Sometimes the church and liturgists and musicians get a bad rap for being tied down by rubrics and other rules about how music should be done in church, what kind of music, and when and who gets to sings. Sometimes, I confess, the criticism is deserved. But I think that most of the time, what we're trying to do is say that the church herself has a long tradition of serving her members, preserving another, profound truth behind the shattering reality of death. For two millennia, the church has experience with human grief, loss, and hope when our reality is shaken loose from its moorings by death, whether expected or unexpected. What we do in those times is meant to announce from every word, every touch, every candle, every color, every smell of the incense, every song the gospel of Jesus Christ, dead and risen. We have a story to tell. And the important fact is that the story is not told to the deceased and those gathered to mourn, but through the deceased and those gathered to mourn. Our rubrics and other rules are there to remind us of that. We don't have to make anything up, verbal and musical smoke and mirrors to make people feel better about a terrible event. We have a tradition of faith that calls us to remember, at a time when we may be at sea in a hurricane of grief and lose, to remember who we are. And who we are is Christ, already dead and risen, for whom death does not exist as an enemy. The Christian, in death as in life, is a sacrament, a visible manifest of an invisible reality. That reality is the paschal mystery. That mystery, the mystery that, somehow, in God and made visible in Jesus Christ, it is always the seed falling into the earth and dying that creates life, makes meaning out of everything that happens to us, because that mystery describes in human metaphor the very life of God. The great Fr. Eugene Walsh, a pastoral liturgist of happy memory, used to offer us this yardstick for life: "Jesus promises you two things: your life will have meaning, and you will live forever. If you get a better offer, take it."

Christian lives are sacraments because of initiation, that is, because we have been brought into the communal life of the Eucharist through baptism and confirmation. In the Rite of Election in the initiation rites, the bishop makes an inquiry of the godparents and other witnesses about the readiness of the candidates, based upon their observations about the lives they are living. Those questions center around the four great pillars of Christian identity drawn from the Acts of the Apostles, pillars we have summarized and imaged into the tiles of our gathering space here at St. Anne. Those questions are: have they listened to God's word proclaimed by the church? Have they responded to the word and begun to walk in God's presence? Have they shared the company of their Christian brothers and sisters and joined with them in prayer? The marks of the beginnings of Christian life, the pattern into which we are formed, ought to be the pattern of the celebration of the Christian's passing to eternal life as well: How did we experience Christ in our deceased friend? How did s/he proclaim the gospel in life, pray and play with the community, and demonstrate the hospitality and service of Christ? Life is sacrament: a visible sign of the invisible reality of life transformed by grace.

Thus, the Christian is light, the word of God, bread from heaven to feed the world. The Christian, like Christ to whom the Holy Spirit bonded us in baptism, is shepherd, resurrection, way, truth, life, living water. The funeral is intended to be witness to that, to say, 'this is how God worked thru my mother, my spouse, my friend, my child, my colleague. This is how the world was saved by her actions, her presence, her smile. This is how the hungry were fed, strangers and enemies were loved, the sick were healed; this is how we knew Christ was present here, God-among-us, when s/he came to the aid of the least of our brothers and sisters.' We have stories about that. The homily especially, and any "words of remembrance" spoken in the service, ought to have those stories, that kind of witness, at the ready: how was our brother or sister a sacrament of the invisible God in his/her life?

Funeral liturgy is about that, praising God for what God did through the one we love. Baptism joined us to Christ in his death and resurrection. Death, as Paul says, no more power over us. That is our message. We live no longer ourselves but Christ is alive in us. In the funeral liturgy, we tell that story, how God became flesh in the Christian. The beloved will never die, not because we will remember them, because, eventually, we won't. Stop telling that lie. They, and we, will never die because God promised that. God will remember. What God remembers lives. What God remembers is. God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. God is the God of the living.

The funeral liturgy that we have only begun to implement in the Order of Christian Funerals imagines several days interspersed with formal and informal celebrations of this memory making, story telling, mourning and rejoicing, grieving and letting go. It imagines this going on in homes, at funeral home, at the wake in the funeral home and/or the church, at the church, and at the place of committal. Different kinds of music are appropriate at different places and times. Almost every kind of music has its place in the celebration of a person's life. What is appropriate at the funeral mass, the climax but neither the beginning nor the end and certainly not the whole celebration of the person's life, is liturgical music. The principles that apply to all church ritual music continue to apply at funerals: full, conscious, active participation of the assembly is primary. Why? Because Christ is the one who is acting in the liturgy, and the gathered community of the baptized is the living presence of Christ.

So what music is called for in the funeral mass? Only music that tells our story.  It is music that proclaims who God is, what God has done for us, who Christ is, what difference Christ makes. It is music that announces the gift of the Holy Spirit that makes us one in Christ and enables our beginning to live the life of God here and now in these mortal bodies, and, we hope, eternally in glorified ones with Christ. It is music that is witness to the body of Christ, the church, and its ongoing mission to bring everyone everywhere to a life of mutual love, of agape, lived 168 hours every week, and celebrated for one or two of those hours around the table of the Messiah.

We sing that, for instance, we can "be not afraid" because Christ has gone before us into every darkness we may face, and we know that if Christ has gone there, then God is there.

We sing, for instance, that God has entered into our pain, “his own son not sparing, sent him to die,” and proclaim in faith “My God, how great thou art.”

We sing for God to “make me a channel of your peace," giving of ourselves, and in dying being born to eternal life. We sing of faith that those who have lived life in the shelter of the Lord and called God “my refuge” will be raised on eagle’s wings and shine like the sun. We sing of Jerusalem, our destiny, the Jerusalem that is the community into which we are baptized, the Jerusalem that is the place, wherever it is, that the Christian encounters the ultimate choice between death and life, the Jerusalem of mystery that awaits us beyond the veil of death.

We sing with great faith and in many musical ways the ancient words of the 23rd psalm, proclaiming that in the very hour of darkness, in the valley of the shadow of death, we go where the good shepherd leads, because we know the shepherd leads us to a full table in a meadow with clear-running streams, where even enemies within bowshot cannot touch us.

We have a story to tell: we belong to God, who is saving the world from its fear of death and obsession with acquisitiveness and power by offering a different way of living in Jesus Christ. We, the baptized, tell that story every moment of our lives, sometimes better than others. But we never tell it more clearly than in the hour of death, when we release our beloved into the hands of God. In the absolute honesty of that time, we see that however much our love ties us to the deceased person, God has loved them infinitely more, called them “beloved” both in birth and in baptism, and nothing in life or death can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. We have a story to tell. We tell that story at home, at the wake, and the funeral, at the committal, in between, before and after. Sometimes we tell it with song. Different moments will call for different kinds of music, and in the funeral mass, a certain kind of music is called for.

Specifically, then, what music do we need for the funeral liturgy?

The participation of the community is called for at all the usual times in the mass, the responsorial psalm, the alleluia or gospel acclamation, the acclamations of the eucharistic prayer. In addition, the assembly ought to be invited to be a part of singing the procession of the mourners and casket, at the beginning of the service, into the body of the church from the doors, singing at communion, and singing the final commendation, which is usually some form of the litany “Saints of God” or the song “May the Angels Lead you into Paradise.” There can be music at the time of the gifts as well, but there’s certainly room for instrumental or reflective music at this time that is not necessarily sung by everyone.

About two years ago I wrote a blog post about commonly used titles in funerals at our parish, based on the way they stack up in an iPad app that I use to store my music. Here is a link to a list of titles (numbers refer to the Gather Third Edition hymnal, which is in our pews) that we make available to individuals and families planning a funeral with a bereavement minister.

This list of songs is not meant to be exclusive at all. Not all the families who come to us to bury their dead are worshippers at St. Anne, and Catholic churches across the country worship not only in a variety of musical styles, they worship with different musical resources and hymnals, and in a variety of languages as well. This list is an expression of how we worship here in Barrington. But music from other hymnals and resources is also quite acceptable within the constraints of our building and instruments, my abilities and those of other musicians, and of course the liturgical parameters I outlined above. And the seasons of the years could well affect the kind of music chosen for a funeral. Certainly in Advent we would be hard pressed to find a song more expressive of our loss and our hopeful longing for the fulfillment of promised joy than the ancient plainsong chant "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel." Christmas offers its own possibilities that express our being caught between love and loss, darkness and light, in songs like "I Wonder as I Wander," "Coventry Carol," "In the Bleak Midwinter," and "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear." Similar material can be found in our Lent and Easter repertoire, of course. And if we're really doing Sunday right, then our normal parish repertoire should be full of songs that attempt to praise the God who unites us in the paschal mystery of Christ, who binds us together in life by plunging us into Christ's death in the waters of baptism so that we can rise with him. Some of the songs I alluded to above, drawn from the Sunday repertoire of our parish and many others, do exactly this, which is why people are drawn to them in times of loss and confusion.

All of us in the parish are grateful for the work that you bereavement ministers do among the grieving, and you need to know that, as Fr. Austin Fleming says in his wonderful book Preparing for Liturgy: A Theology and Spirituality, by the work you do God is saving the world. I hope these words can help you appreciate how important the work you do is, and for all of us mortals, all of us who will indeed die one day, help us to see that in death as in life we are part of a great mystery, the paschal mystery of the God of the living. God remembers us, and so we live. That is the promise. In death, for God's faithful people, life is changed, not ended.